Most people think through if they want to live in the city, but what people forget to think about is the long term impact of living in a particular city. Suppose you’re graduating college and you get an offer from Google’s Irvine CA office. That’s fantastic. You must be really excited. Great company + great [...]

I’ve been asked to give the keynote address for ITAG’s Girls Exploring Tomorrow’s Technology event. It’s made me think about what I want to tell these these kids – what skills I wish they would all acquire. I’ve come up with these five skills that, I believe, virtually guarantee success in life. 1. Writing This [...]

Though awards could be a selling point of your resume, for most people, they fall sort of… flat. A typical “awards” section on a resume looks something like this: Alpha Nu Scholarship Recipient (2010). 1st Place, Innovation Award (2009). Although the second bullet is a bit better than the first one, both are fairly meaningless. [...]

I get this question so often that it’s worth posting the answer more publicly. The question goes something like this: I had 5 interviews for a software development position. 4 went really well – I got all the answers perfectly. I bombed the fifth one though. I don’t think I got the best solution, and [...]

In the desperate fight to recruit engineers, start-ups and major companies alike are trying to spruce up their job descriptions with titles like “Code Ninja” and “Rails Rockstar.” It turns out that, by and large, engineers aren’t fooled by this. If anything, they’re turned off by this language. Cute things like Ninja make me think [...]

There’s no grabbing intro story here. No great quote. And no numbered top-10 list. There’s just some simple advice: don’t join a start-up when you graduate. Or, at least, don’t join a small, unknown start-up if you can instead get into one of the top big tech companies. The problem with joining a start-up when [...]

“Self-publishing” is a strange word. It’s hip and sexy in one way – people love disruptive technologies. At the same time, no one wants to be known as being a self-published author. Getting professionally published is hard and self-publishing is “easy” – or at least that’s what most believe. As someone who has enjoyed success self-publishing and professionally publishing, let [...]

Liberals and conservatives alike are looking over their shoulder and laughing at the “Occupy” movement. It’s not because of what their demands are, but rather because of their demands are everything and nothing at the same time. Fundamentally, their core frustration is not a political one, but an emotional one. They’re sick of feeling ignored [...]

Somehow, many candidates have gotten the impression that the interview process is some elaborate system, and if their process is different from their friend’s, it must be a reason for it. The truth is so much more straightforward than that, and once you get, everything will make sense. Or that’s my hope, anyway. Here’s how [...]

The 5th edition of the best-selling programming interview prep book, Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions, is officially on sale. And even better – Amazon is currently running a 20% sale on the book! Now, I know you’re used to new editions being a couple little fixes here, packaged in a [...]